"(Religion) With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg
Another example of someone who should be not only fired but banned from ever owning a firearm or being in any kind of position of responsibility. Not even a McCook.
A Denver police officer has been suspended after allegedly brandishing his gun at a McDonald's restaurant in Aurora after his order took too long to fill.
Aurora police confirmed the CBS4 investigation saying the incident
occurred May 21 at the McDonald's at 18181 East Hampden Avenue.
A spokesperson for the Aurora Police Department said they plan to
present the case -- now classified as a felony menacing incident -- to
the Arapahoe County District Attorney's Office Thursday for possible
filing of criminal charges.Sources familiar with the case, and the fast food worker's account of
what happened, say two off-duty Denver police officers placed an order
from their car in the early morning hours of May 21. But once at the
drive through window, the employee said the men became agitated and
angry at how long their food was taking. The men thought they were
being ignored, according to contacts familiar with the worker's
account. The male clerk then said one of the officer's flashed his
police badge and pointed a pistol through the drive through window in a
threatening manner, before driving off without paying.
The real US - Iran situation and how the US can (can not) deal with it
Juan Cole's response to President Obama's speech on Tuesday. As noted and also all over the MSM it doesn't stop the Limbaugh/McCain/Bohener/Graham/Beck/Palin/Graham/Malkin... hate & lie machine.
But there are dangers here. Obama
will likely be as helpless before a crackdown by the Iranian regime as
Eisenhower was re: Hungary in 1956, Johnson was re: Prague in 1968, and
Bush senior was re: Tienanmen Square in 1989. George W. Bush, it should
remember, did nothing about Tehran's crackdown on student protesters in
2003 or about the crackdown on reformist candidates, which excluded
them from running in the 2004 Iranian parliamentary elections, or about
the probably fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad in 2005. It is hard to
see what he could have done, contrary to what his erstwhile supporters
in Congress now seem to imply. As an oil state, the Iranian regime does
not need the rest of the world and is not easy to pressure. So Obama
needs to be careful about raising expectations of any sort of practical
intervention by the US, which could not possibly succeed. (Despite the
US media's determined ignoring the the Afghanistan War, it is rather a
limiting factor on US options with regard to Iran.) Moreover, if the
regime succeeds in quelling the protests, however odious it is, it will
still be a chess piece on the board of international diplomacy and the
US will have to deal with it just as it deals with post-Tiananmen China.
And,
the more Obama speaks on the subject, even in these terms, the more he
risks associating the Mousavi supporters with a CIA plot. Iranian media
are already parading arrested protesters
who are 'confessing' that 'Western media' led them astray. In
nationalist and wounded Iran, if someone is successfully tagged as an
agent of foreign interests, it is the political kiss of death.
The
fact is that despite the bluster of the American Right that Something
Must be Done, the United States is not a neutral or benevolent player
in Iran. Washington overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953
over oil nationalization, and installed the megalomaniac and oppressive
Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, who gradually so alienated all social classes in
Iran that he was overthrown in a popular revolution in 1978-1979. The
shah had a national system of domestic surveillance and tossed people
in jail for the slightest dissidence, and was supported to the hilt by
the United States government. So past American intervention has not
been on the side of let us say human rights.
More recently, the
US backed the creepy and cult-like Mojahedin-e Khalq (People's Holy
Warriors or MEK), which originated in a mixture of communist Stalinism
and fundamentalist Islam. The MEK is a terrorist organization and has
blown things up inside Iran, so the Pentagon's ties with them are wrong
in so many ways. The MEK, by the way, has a very substantial lobby in
Washington DC and has some congressmen in its back pocket, and is
supported by the less savory elements of the Israel lobbies such as
Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson. I am not saying they should be
investigated for material support of terrorism, since I am appalled by
the unconstitutional breadth of that current DOJ tactic, but I am
signalling that the US imperialist Right has been up to very sinister
things in Iran for decades. A person who worked in the Pentagon once
alleged to me that then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was
privately pushing for using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. And
Dick Cheney is so attached to launching war on Iran that he
characterized attempts to deflect such plans as a "conspiracy." Given
what the US did to Fallujah, it strikes me as unlikely that a military
invasion of Iran would be good for that country's civic life. And there
are rather disadvantages to being nuked, even by the kindliest of WASP
gentlemen of Mr. Rumsfeld's ilk.
Moreover, very unfortunately,
US politicians are no longer in a position to lecture other countries
about their human rights. The kind of unlicensed, city-wide
demonstrations being held in Tehran last week would not be allowed to
be held in the United States. Senator John McCain led the charge
against Obama for not having sufficiently intervened in Iran. At the
Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul, 250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium.
Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her
staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, 'protest zones' were
assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded
civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations
outside designated 'protest zones' would be illegal in New York City,
apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken
to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many
observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will
know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil
damages.
Remember when it was the liberal guests who ended up looking like sputtering morons on the O'Reilly Factor? Tonight it was the host. Joan Walsh turned the tables.
Her secret?
Remain calm.
Finish your sentences, even if O'Reilly interrupts you.
Do your research and form your soundbites ahead of time.
Don't raise your voice higher than Bills, or get more emotional. This way, he looks like the crazy one, as nature intended.
Leave no charge unanswered, even if it sounds absurd. Especially if it sounds absurd.
The Salon editor's vitruoso performance led an enraged O'Reilly to the fantastic conclusion that, in fact, Walsh
was responsible for the death of abortion doctor George Tiller, because
she branded him a hero. Uh, OK! Well, it looks like that's all you have
time for. Enjoy your weekend, Bill, and try not to think too much about
how you had your ass handed to you, by a San Francisco liberal. That'll
just make you angry.
The last time wolverines were known to live in Colorado, Theodore Roosevelt
had just died and women had not yet won the right to vote. But now, 90
years later, researchers using radio tracking devices have followed a
wolverine into the state.
The scientists concede that
the return of one animal to a species’ ancient range is hardly cause
for jubilation. “Somewhat of an anomaly,” Rick Kahn, an official in the
Colorado Division of Wildlife, called it in a statement.
But
the researchers hope their efforts to track the young male, designated
M56, will help explain why only an estimated 250 to 500 wolverines
remain in the lower 48 states and what their fate might be in the face
of development and climate change.
Wolverines live in Alaska and Canada, and “we know they used to be in
Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, California and Washington,”
said Robert M. Inman, who directs the Greater Yellowstone Wolverine
Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the organization that also runs the Bronx Zoo.
It was a crudely stage-managed insult to everyone involved. By Christopher HitchensPosted Sunday, June 14, 2009, at 6:41 PM ET
For
a flavor of the political atmosphere in Tehran, Iran, last week, I
quote from a young Iranian comrade who furnishes me with regular
updates:
I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally
and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about.
Lots of splotchy boys who can't get a date are given guns and told
they're special.
It's hard to better this, either as an evocation of the rancid
sexual repression that lies at the nasty core of the "Islamic republic"
or as a description of the reserve strength that the Iranian
para-state, or state within a state, can bring to bear if it ever feels
itself even slightly challenged. There is a theoretical reason why the
events of the last month in Iran (I am sorry, but I resolutely decline
to refer to them as elections) were a crudely stage-managed
insult to those who took part in them and those who observed them. And
then there is a practical reason. The theoretical reason, though less
immediately dramatic and exciting, is the much more interesting and
important one.
Iran and its citizens are considered by the Shiite
theocracy to be the private property of the anointed mullahs. This
totalitarian idea was originally based on a piece of religious quackery
promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and known as velayat-e faqui.
Under the terms of this edict—which originally placed the clerics in
charge of the lives and property of orphans, the indigent, and the
insane—the entire population is now declared to be a childlike ward of
the black-robed state. Thus any voting exercise is, by definition, over
before it has begun, because the all-powerful Islamic Guardian Council
determines well in advance who may or may not "run." Any newspaper
referring to the subsequent proceedings as an election, sometimes complete with rallies, polls, counts,
and all the rest of it, is the cause of helpless laughter among the
ayatollahs. ("They fell for it? But it's too easy!") Shame on all those
media outlets that have been complicit in this dirty lie all last week.
And shame also on our pathetic secretary of state, who said that she
hoped that "the genuine will and desire" of the people of Iran would be
reflected in the outcome. Surely she knows that any such contingency
was deliberately forestalled to begin with.
In theory, the first
choice of the ayatollahs might not actually "win," and there could even
be divisions among the Islamic Guardian Council as to who constitutes
the best nominee. Secondary as that is, it can still lead to rancor.
After all, corrupt systems are still subject to fraud. This, like
hypocrisy, is the compliment that vice pays to virtue. With
near-incredible brutishness and cruelty, then, the guardians moved to
cut off cell-phone and text-message networks that might give even an
impression of fairness and announced though their storm-troop
"revolutionary guards" that only one form of voting had divine
sanction. ("The miraculous hand of God," announced Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, had been present in the polling places and had announced a
result before many people had even finished voting. He says that sort
of thing all the time.)
The obvious evidence of fixing, fraud, and
force to one side, there is another reason to doubt that an illiterate
fundamentalist like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could have increased even a
state-sponsored plebiscite-type majority. Everywhere else in the Muslim
world, in every election in the last two years, the tendency has been
the other way. In Morocco in 2007, the much-ballyhooed Justice and Development Party
wound up with 14 percent of the vote. In Malaysia and Indonesia, the
predictions of increased market share for the pro-Sharia parties were
likewise falsified. In Iraq this last January, the local elections
penalized the clerical parties that had been making life a misery in
cities like Basra. In neighboring Kuwait last month, the Islamist
forces did poorly, and four women—including the striking figure of Rola Dashti,
who refuses to wear any headgear—were elected to the 50-member
parliament. Most important of all, perhaps, Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah
was convincingly and unexpectedly defeated last week in Lebanon after
an open and vigorous election, the results of which were not challenged
by any party. And, from all I hear, if the Palestinians were to vote
again this year—as they were at one point supposed to do—it would be
highly improbable that Hamas would emerge the victor.
Yet somehow
a senile and fanatical religious clique that has failed even to
condition the vote in a country like Lebanon, where it has proxy and
surrogate parties under arms, is able to reward itself by increasing
its "majority" in a festeringly bankrupt state where it controls the
media and enjoys a monopoly of violence. I think we should deny it any
official recognition of this consolation. (I recommend a reading of "Neither Free Nor Fair: Elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran"
and other productions of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation. This
shows that past penalties for not pleasing the Islamic Guardian Council
have included more than mere disqualification and have extended to
imprisonment and torture and death, sometimes in that order. A new
movie by Cyrus Nowrasteh, The Stoning of Soraya M.,
will soon show what happens to those who dare to dissent in other ways
and are dealt with by Ahmadinejad's "grass roots" fanatics.)
Mention
of the Lebanese elections impels me to pass on what I saw with my own
eyes at a recent Hezbollah rally in south Beirut, Lebanon. In a large
hall that featured the official attendance of a delegation from the
Iranian Embassy, the most luridly displayed poster of the pro-Iranian
party was a nuclear mushroom cloud! Underneath this telling symbol was
a caption warning the "Zionists" of what lay in store. We sometimes
forget that Iran still officially denies any intention of acquiring
nuclear weapons. Yet Ahmadinejad recently hailed an Iranian missile
launch as a counterpart to Iran's success with nuclear centrifuges, and
Hezbollah has certainly been allowed to form the idea that the Iranian
reactors may have nonpeaceful applications. This means, among other
things, that the vicious manipulation by which the mullahs control Iran
can no longer be considered their "internal affair." Fascism at home
sooner or later means fascism abroad. Face it now or fight it later.
Meanwhile, give it its right name.
I could think of much more descriptive language but this is just one more in the list of millions of reasons police have and deserve no respect. There are just too many "bad apples". If "good" cops really cared they would clean this sort of ongoing shit up rather than just cover it up.
Oklahoma Highway Patrol finally releases video of trooper attack on paramedic
It took a while for the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to release a video showing one of its troopers choking a paramedic
who was taking an elderly patient to the hospital, and now that it's
available on YouTube, you can understand why they tried to suppress it.
I'm in awe of the dignified and articulate ambulance supervisor
who bravely stands up to the sickeningly hotheaded trooper who is
furious that anyone would dare to "jump out and talk to a State Trooper
like that."
Patricia Phillips, Oklahoma Crime Examiner, has been covering the story:
An ambulance, with Maurice White acting as supervisor
and paramedic, is taking an elderly woman, who had collapsed, to the
hospital for treatment. Her worried family follows.
Trooper Daniel Martin, who was responding to a stolen car report,
came up behind the ambulance on a two-lane country road. In Oklahoma,
those shoulders are notoriously tricky for even a car to pull off onto.
But there's another factor involved.
As the dash cam clearly shows, a car is on the right-hand
shoulder, partially obstructing the highway. Just as the highway patrol
pulls up behind the ambulance, the medical unit must swing out to avoid
colliding with the parked car.
Let me repeat that, because it's important: if the ambulance's
driver, Paul Franks, had immediately pulled over when the racing
trooper came up behind him, he would have created an accident. It is
impossible to safely pull over while slamming into another vehicle.
After the ambulance gets past the parked vehicle, Franks slows
and safely pulls over for the trooper. As Martin zooms by--at a speed
that I would call excessive for just a stolen car report--he uses the
radio to reprimand the ambulance for not pulling over.
Later in the tape, it's shown that the sheriff's department is
already on scene at the stolen car incident. Martin is released from
any need to be at the scene.
Then he whips around, guns his car, and goes out hunting the
ambulance. When he catches up with the ambulance, what happens next is
a textbook case for bad judgment and abuse of power.
J.D. Tuccille of Civil Liberties Examiner
says: "Consider this a test case. If you don't see a paramedic's
life-saving responsibilities as at least as pressing as the
law-enforcement duties of a police officer, there probably is no limit
to the authority you're willing to grant any government employee with a
badge."
Some comentators have suggested that the reason Western reporters were
shocked when Ahmadinejad won was that they are based in opulent North
Tehran, whereas the farmers and workers of Iran, the majority, are
enthusiastic for Ahmadinejad. That is, we fell victim once again to
upper middle class reporting and expectations in a working class
country of the global south.
While such dynamics may have
existed, this analysis is flawed in the case of Iran because it pays
too much attention to class and material factors and not enough to
Iranian culture wars. We have already seen, in 1997 and 2001, that
Iranian women and youth swung behind an obscure former minister of
culture named Mohammad Khatami and his 2nd of Khordad movement,
capturing not only the presidency but also, in 2000, parliament.
Khatami
received 70 percent of the vote in 1997. He then got 78% of the vote in
2001, despite a crowded field. In 2000, his reform movement captured
65% of the seats in parliament. He is a nice man, but you couldn't
exactly categorize him as a union man or a special hit with farmers.
The
evidence is that in the past little over a decade, Iran's voters had
become especially interested in expanding personal liberties, in
expanding women's rights, and in a wider field of legitimate expression
for culture (not just high culture but even just things like Iranian
rock music). The extreme puritanism of the hardliners grated on people.
The
problem for the reformers of the late 1990s and early 2000s was that
they did not actually control much, despite holding elected office.
Important government policy and regulation was in the hands of the
unelected, clerical side of the government. The hard line clerics just
shut down reformist newspapers, struck down reformist legislation, and
blocked social and economic reform. The Bush administration was
determined to hang Khatami out to dry, ensuring that the reformers
could never bring home any tangible success in foreign policy or
foreign investment. Thus, in the 2004 parliamentary elections,
literally thousands of reformers were simply struck off the ballot and
not allowed to run. This application of a hard line litmus test in
deciding who could run for office produced a hard line parliament,
naturally enough.
But in 2000, it was clear that the hard liners only had about 20% of the electorate on their side.
By
2005, the hard liners had rolled back all the reforms and the reform
camp was sullen and defeated. They did not come out in large numbers
for the reformist candidate, Karoubi, who only got 17 percent of the
vote. They nevertheless were able to force a run-off between hard line
populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former president Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, a pragmatic conservative billionaire. Ahmadinejad won.
But
Ahmadinejad's 2005 victory was made possible by the widespread boycott
of the vote or just disillusionment in the reformist camp, meaning that
fewer youth and women bothered to come out.
So to believe that
the 20% hard line support of 2001 has become 63% in 2009, we would have
to posit that Iran is less urban, less literate and less interested in
cultural issues today than 8 years ago. We would have to posit that the
reformist camp once again boycotted the election and stayed home in
droves.
No, this is not a north Tehran/ south Tehran issue. Khatami won by big margins despite being favored by north Tehran.
So
observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for
Mousavi's smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the
last 12 years of Iranian history. It was about culture wars, not class.
It is simply not true that the typical Iranian voter votes conservative
and religious when he or she gets the chance. In fact, Mousavi is
substantially more conservative than the typical winning politician in
2000. Given the enormous turnout of some 80 percent, and given the
growth of Iran's urban sector, the spread of literacy, and the obvious
yearning for ways around the puritanism of the hard liners, Mousavi
should have won in the ongoing culture war.
And just because
Ahmadinejad poses as a champion of the little people does not mean that
his policies are actually good for workers or farmers or for working
class women (they are not, and many people in that social class know
that they are not).
So let that be an end to the guilt trip. The
Second of Khordad Movement was a winning coalition for the better part
of a decade. Its supporters are 8 years older than the last time they
won, but it was a young movement. Did they all do a 180 and defect from
Khatami to Ahmadinejad? Unlikely. The Iranian women who voted in droves
for Khatami haven't gone anywhere, and they did not very likely much care for Ahmadinejad's stances on women's issues:
'In a BBC News interview, Mahbube Abbasqolizade, a member of the
Iranian Women’s Centre NGO, said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad’s policies are that
women should return to their homes and that their priority should be
the family.”
* Ahmadinejad changed the name of the government
organization the “Centre for Women’s Participation” to the “Centre for
Women and Family Affairs”.
* Ahmadinejad proposed a new law that
would reintroduce a man’s right to divorce his wife without informing
her. In addition, men would no longer be required to pay alimony. In
response, women’s groups have initiated the Million Signatures campaign
against these measures.
* Ahmadinejad’s administration opposes
the ratification of the UN protocol called CEDAW, the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. This doctrine
is essentially an international women’s Bill of Rights.
*
Ahmadinejad implemented the Social Safety program, which monitors
women’s clothing, requires the permission from a father or husband for
a woman to attend school, and applies quotas limiting the number of
women allowed to attend universities.'
Mir Hosain
Mousavi was a plausible candidate for the reformists. They were
electing people like him with 70 and 80 percent margins just a few
years ago. We have not been had by the business families of north
Tehran. We've much more likely been had by a hard line constituency of
at most 20% of the country, who claim to be the only true heirs of the
Iranian revolution, and who control which ballots see the light of day.
For
reasons which I personally cannot fathom, the American media seems to
have decided that the Iranian election and it's aftermath were either
not newsworthy at all or simply a minor story not worth interrupting
regular programming. After seeing report after report on Twitter
last night from inside Iran about the rapidly deteriorating situation
there, I flipped to every major news station on TV. Nobody was covering
what was happening in Iran. Larry King was interviewing motorcycle
builders, MSNBC was airing a sensationalistic documentary on some
American prison, and Glen Beck was...well...playing with goldfish.
Disgusted, I turned the TV off and went back to Twitter.
If
you want news out of Iran - not the official government press releases
but breaking news from the street level - check out the #iranelection
hashtag. If you are new to Twitter and unfamiliar with how to search
for hashtags, you can simply go here. You just may be surprised at how little the American media is telling you about the situation on the ground.
COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - A state Republican activist has admitted to and
apologized for calling a gorilla that escaped from the Riverbanks Zoo
Friday an "ancestor" of First Lady Michelle Obama.
A screen capture of the comment, made on the Internet site Facebook,
was obtained by FITSNews, the website of South Carolina politico Will
Folks.
The image shows a post by an aide to state Attorney General Henry
McMaster describing Friday morning's gorilla escape at Columbia's
Riverbanks Zoo.
Longtime SCGOP activist and former state Senate candidate Rusty
DePass responded with the comment, "I'm sure it's just one of
Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."
DePass told WIS News 10 he was talking about First Lady Michelle Obama.
And then DePass offered the rote non-apology apology:
We spoke with DePass over the phone Friday night. He said, "I am as
sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in
jest."
Clearly in jest. Clearly. Surely. Only humorless, hypersensitive,
politically correct people would make a stink over something so
harmless. How could anybody be offended by a joke that DePass probably heard the first version of from his grandfather who heard it from his grandfather?
Ah, yes, those Republicans have such a rambunctious
funnybone. So funny, in fact, that they can't leave well enough alone
and nearly always make things worse by just making shit up:
DePass took his apology a bit further. He also said, "The comment
was hers. Not mine," saying the first lady made statements in the media
recently saying we are all descendants of apes.
But an Internet search for those comments turned up no news articles of the like.
No surprise there. In fact, the ape reference in relation to African Americans has a long history.
But it's not just history. Some Americans, especially those of us
raised in the South, grew up with it as standard fare, even in the
classroom. While the crudest depictions of black people as apes have
disappeared from American culture, for many there remains a mental
association of African Americans with apes.
Not only is it not a jest, it is also not harmless prejudice.
According to six cognitive studies put together by a team of
psychologists led by Professor Philip Atiba Goff, "participants’ basic cognitive processes ... significantly alter[ed] their judgments in criminal justice contexts."
Included in the team's studies - published as "Not Yet Human:
Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary
Consequences" - was an archival look at hundreds of articles published
in the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1979-1999. They discovered that blacks convicted of capital crimes were four times more likely than
convicted whites to be described with "ape-relevant" language, such as
"barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." Worse, they wrote:
...those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not. [My emphasis - MB]
Arriving in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, I went on dozens of
ridealongs in police cruisers as part of an effort to get acquainted
with the gang phenomenon in the part of the city that was then called
South Central, then predominately African American. Officers constantly
would refer to a call as an N.H.I. I soon discovered this meant No
Humans Involved.
I suppose Rusty DePass would find that pretty funny, too.
Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen is revealed to have an enlightened
attitude about marijuana in this exchange with drug war dinosaur Robert
Mueller. The tired-looking FBI director seems to be reciting his false
arguments like a pull-string puppet. (Via The Agitator)
Here's yet another example of police brutality against a schizophrenic man in Passaic, New Jersey.
Surveillance tape from Lawrence's Grill and Bar in Passaic
on May 29 shows a police car pull up to Ronnie Holloway, who is
standing still on the curb outside the restaurant. After a few moments
Holloway zips up his sweatshirt -- because the female officer in the
car instructed him to do so, Holloway said.
At that point, the other officer in the vehicle, Joseph R. Rios
III, exits the car, grabs Holloway and slams him onto the hood of the
police car. He then pummels Holloway with his fist and baton.
Here's a report from the local TV station that shows
the surveillance tape. It shows the man standing on the street corner,
a police car pulls up and they start talking to him. He zips up his
sweatshirt, as he says they instructed him to do, and the cops get out
of the car and one of them just starts beating him. There is nothing
even remotely threatening in anything the man does, he's just standing
there talking to them.
The man says he didn't say anything to them to justify the beating,
but that misses the point. It doesn't matter what he might have said to
them. Even if he was telling them that their mothers were whores and
they can go fuck themselves, that could not possibly justifying beating
him down with a baton.
And yes, the cop who did this is still on active duty. Worse yet,
the victim has been charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct
and a ridiculous crime called "wandering for the purpose of obtaining
controlled dangerous substances." The cop should not only be fired, he
should be prosecuted. That's what would happen to him if he didn't have
the badge on
The
church planned to use the giveaway as a draw for a youth conference it
was hosting. Teenagers from as far away as Canada attend.
The
church began the practice of giving away a gun last year, coinciding
with a shooting competition. (Video of the competition had been posted
on the church Web site until it was recently removed.) This year, from the start the gun giveaway was part of the marketing campaign.
Youth
Pastor Bob Ross, who described the event as “21 hours of preaching and
teaching throughout the week,” said to reporters, “I don’t want people
thinking, ‘My goodness, we’re putting a weapon in the hand of somebody
that doesn’t respect it who is then going to go out an kill. That’s not
at all what we’re trying to do.”
Ross said the church will give away the gun, valued at around $800, next year instead.
You
know what's annoying? Opening your daily Metro on the T only to find
one of those giant Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons getting in the way of
your sudoku. You know what's tragic? Opening your daily Metro on the T
only to find a steaming pile of bigoted anti-gay bullshit.
Today, the Boston Metro has devoted page 6 (labeled "news") to
bigots who supported Proposition 8 in California, possibly in attempt
to be Fair and Balanced and present both sides of an important issue.
One side is that gays deserve equal rights. The other side is that gays
getting married will destroy American society with an all-consuming
flood of gayness because the Bible says so. But don't worry, they're
not really bigots because they knew a guy in high school who was gay
and they totally didn't really care that he was going to hell for his
evil ways. Here's an example from a 24-year old writer from Sacramento
whose best friend since high school is gay:
To
Lewis, it’s not about quarantining gays as second-class citizens. It's
about upholding a long-standing tradition that he sees as unifying
American society.
"Not everyone who voted for Proposition 8 is an anti-gay bigot," he
said. "Some of us have true, heartfelt concerns about where our society
is headed."
Oh, now it's clear: gays shouldn't be able to marry because straight
people's ability to get married is unifying American society. Let's be
clear: heterosexual marriage isn't even unifying heterosexuals, since
the divorce rate is currently 40 to 50%. Also, if you don't want gays
to marry because you're worried about the negative effects it would
have on society, you're either bigoted or ignorant, since gay marriage
hasn't yet destroyed Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, South
Africa, Norway, and Sweden. Nor has it screwed up Massachusetts,
Connecticut, or Iowa. In fact, allowing gays to marry is more likely to strengthen the economy. Imagine that!
Another genius quoted by the Metro is Grant Inderbitzen of Modesto, California, with this winning argument:
"Marriage has a definition that does not include two men or
two women," Inderbitzen said. "It's like, if someone found a new color,
they can't call it 'blue.' Blue already exists."
Checkmate, equal rights activists! We all know that there's
only one kind of "blue!" In the same way that "marriage" has always
meant "one man plus one woman," never in the history of the universe
has the word "blue" ever meant anything even slightly different from this exact shade of blue.
That article, headlined Prop 8 supporters: Don't call us bigots, was just the warm-up. The real winner is the sidebar opinion piece penned by Timothy Dalrymple, titled Gay marriage disturbs the natural order. It includes gems such as:
The Christian views of the sanctity of marriage and the
potential harm of homosexual marriage arise from basic Christian
convictions on what it means to be human.
Ah. So, married heterosexuals are human and married
homosexuals are not. Singletons are presumably somewhere in between.
Got it. Dalrymple goes on to say that homosexuals are unable to find
fulfillment and learn to love "across the deepest divide." By which he
means the divide between a penis and a vagina.
But wait! It gets better!
We can no more revise the basis of marriage than we can revise the laws governing atoms.
Read that again. Process. Okay, proceed.
Let's start by examining how Christians have revised the basis of marriage since the printing of the Bible. As Betty Bowers recently pointed out,
the Bible offers some interesting ideas of what marriage should be. For
instance, in the case of King David, marriage is between a man, a
woman, nine other women, and scores of concubines. Also, Deuteronomy
2:28-29 mandates that a woman must marry any man who rapes her,
provided the rapist pays her father 50 shekels of silver.
Meanwhile, the laws governing atoms continue to not exist. See,
Dalrymple has confused the idea of a law that politicians enact to
control how we behave and a law that scientists develop to explain
the way the world behaves. And guess what? Atoms behave the same way
now—when gays are marrying—as they did thousands of years ago, when
Abram (Genesis 16) was banging his wife and his wife's slave girl
Hagar, who also became his wife.
Dalrymple wraps up by mentioning that gays can't live lives that
"lead to complete wholeness and healing," so that's a shame. But he's
not a bigot! Some of his best friends are gay, and he's so totally sad
they're incomplete, unloving, unloved, offensive, unfulfilled broken
sinners who will surely rot in the bowels of hell.
I noticed that the counter on the left went up today by 5. That was due to 5 deaths reported for the week ending May 30th. Click on the widget on the left for details.
Not really. But it's what religious right leader Pat Robertson just
claimed about gays. So if Robertson can use science that was debunked
nearly four decades ago, in order to slur gays, then we can use the
same to brand Robertson and his followers as nothing more than evidence
of what sick things happen to your mind and soul when your pastor rapes
you. From Media Matters:
Responding to a woman who writes a letter to him asking how she should “handle” her homosexual son
ROBERTSON:
I am not at all persuaded that so-called homosexuals are homosexuals
because of biological problems. They’re may be a very few but there are
so many that have been made homosexuals because of a coach or a
guidance counselor or some other male figure who has abused them and
they think that there’s something wrong with their sexuality so you
need to get deep into why he is what he is instead of just saying “he’s
a homosexual so how do I handle him and how do I be Christian?” Well, I
think you ought to tell him “Listen, son. Here’s what the Bible says
about this and it’s called an abomination before God so I’ve got to
tell you the truth because I love you.” That’s what I think.
Not only were Middle East terrorist attacks against the US not a priority, domestic terrorism issues were also brushed aside and ignored - this is an ongoing problem
Or reason # 8 bazillion and 99 why religion poisons everything . Although many of the religious do not support this type of violence, they ALL enable it.
Figuring out what's going to be in the next Apple iPhone, expected next week, turns out to be surprisingly easy.
...
The next iPhone will be able to capture video: there will be enough processor power there. (Other mobile phones
have had video capabilities for ages, but Apple appears to have wanted
to have something special to sell, and wanted to preserve battery
life.) Expect an improved camera - 3 megapixels, up from the present
2MP, is a reasonable upgrade.
We can also make a number of other
forecasts based on those, and other ineluctable realities about the
cost of components in computing.
1) Its Flash storage will be
doubled. Prices there are halving every year, so rather than the
present 8GB and 16GB models, you'll see 16GB and 32GB. A separate data
point on this comes from Darren Waters of the BBC, who says he has heard this, independently, from a Carphone Warehouse source. (CPW sells iPhones in the UK.)
2)
You'll have a lot more onboard RAM: 256MB in total, rather than 128.
Again, simple economics: it costs the same for that much as it did two
years ago. That will mean that applications can store more data in
memory and boot faster. It might also mean that you'll get better video
quality, since there will be more available for the graphics chip.
...
The quick 5-second roundup: -significantly faster -will record video -better camera -no FM. (Uses battery, so let accessories companies fight for it) -twice the storage of current models -still no Flash -will work as a modem (it's always been able to, but networks refused to allow it) -same price.
Another hopeful addition to the FBI's domestic terrorism watchlist
Hope this "person" is on the FBI's terror watch list as well. I've never understood her nor the radical white supremacist fascination with rantings. A medication dosage problem? Schizophrenic, psychotic? I thought she was one of the "mud people"? Aren't they going come back and get her after they've gotten all of them libruls and atheists? I guess my librul brain just doesn't understand the complexities of white supremacy and religious nuttery.
"When
a right-wing Christian vigilante kills, millions of fingers pull the
trigger. When a left-wing Muslim vigilante kills, he kills alone..."
Howie
ponders the different coverage of the story, but JUST LETS PASS the
reference to yet another religious extremist of a varying faith that
Michelle Malkin especially hates and accepts he's "left-wing".
"We
need to be aware of the creation of a fearful population, and fearful
lawmakers, being led to believe that big government is the answer, to
bail out the private sector, because then government gets to get in
there and control it," she said. "And mark my words, this is going to
be next, I fear, bail out next debt-ridden states. Then government gets
to get in there and control the people."
"Some in Washington
would approach our economic woes in ways that absolutely defy Economics
101, and they fly in the face of principles, providing opportunity for
industrious Americans to succeed or to fail on their own accord," she
said. "Those principles it makes you wonder what the heck some in
Washington are trying to accomplish here."
Though the bulk of
her remarks focused on government encroachment into the private sector,
and praise for former President Reagan's views on limited government,
the former vice presidential candidate briefly touched on national
security. She told the crowd that "the terrorists are still dead set
against us" and that her son Track is still deployed in Iraq.
"It
is war over there, so it will not be war over here," she said. "And it
had better still be our mission that we win, they lose."
Apparently
she still hasn't learned proper English. The folksy stuff is cute, but
makes her sound like an uneducated neanderthal. She's never going to
understand that only 20% of the population (i.e., Republicans) find the
dumb beauty queen schtick a quality we look for in our leaders (and TV
commentators).
Presented annually by the Freedom From Religion Foundation to
recognize defenders of the constitutional principle of separation of
church and state
1985 - Ishmael Jaffree
Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 72 (1985)
Calling him "an authentic American hero," the Freedom From Religion
Foundation inaugurated the "Freethinker of the Year" award at its
September 1985 convention to recognize the contributions of Ishmael
Jaffree. As an agnostic, a father of six children and an attorney for a
Mobile, Alabama Legal Services Corporation, Mr. Jaffree discovered in
1981 that his children were being fed daily doses of the Lord's prayer
and grace at lunch, with an occasional bible-reading. After his
complaints were ignored, he filed a lawsuit in May 1982 on behalf of
three of his young children, challenging a 1978 law authorizing a
one-minute period of silence, a 1981 statute authorizing a period of
silence "for meditation or voluntary prayer," and a 1982 law
authorizing teachers to lead "willing students" in a prescribed prayer
to "Almighty God . . . the Creator and Supreme Judge of the world."
During the 1982 trial, the infamous Judge Hand permitted 600 Christians
to intervene; school officials led children in prayer in front of the
media. Jaffree's children were ostracized, laughed at, talked about,
subjected to racial epithets and physically harassed. Judge Hand issued
a ruling in 1983 against Jaffree, claiming the Supreme Court was wrong
about the separation of state and church, and that the First Amendment
does not bar states from establishing a religion. The case proceeded by
way of the Eleventh Circuit to the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 4, 1985,
the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Jaffree's favor, declaring
unconstitutional a period of silence for "meditation or voluntary
prayer" in public schools.
"I brought the case because I wanted to encourage toleration among
my children. I certainly did not want teachers who have control over my
children for at least eight hours over the day to. . . program them
into any religious philosophy."
A
typical American church service includes religious hymns, readings from
the Bible and prayers. But a house of worship in Kentucky is seeking to
add a new element: guns.
Promoters
of the Independence Day event are asking attendees to bring their
unloaded weapons to the service, which will include patriotic music,
talks by gun store owners and a raffle to win a handgun.
He said the momentum for the service grew during Barack Obama's candidacy for president. Firearm sales have surged since Obama was elected president over fears he will tighten gun laws.
Pagano
said the event is "just a celebration we're doing to coincide with
Fourth of July". "There are people who own firearms and do so
responsibly and enjoy them as a sport, maybe like golfing or bowling."
Critics
argue the service goes against Jesus Christ's message of peace.
Reverend Jerry Cappel, president of the Kentuckiana Interfaith
Community, said: "Even if I were perfectly comfortable with open-carry
handguns or gun rights, it seems to me a completely whole other thing
to connect those rights to Jesus Christ."
Combining the event
"with one who explicitly called us to put down the sword and pick up
the cross and love our enemies and turn the other cheek, it just makes
no sense," he said.
I don't believe in western morality,
i.e. don't kill civilians or children, don't destroy holy sites, don't
fight during holiday seasons, don't bomb cemeteries, don't shoot until
they shoot first because it is immoral.
The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).
Head of the GOP reiterates that he wants Obama to fail
And of course Obama failing means he wants 'Merika to fail. Yes, indeed, the GOP is rebranding; into a collection of the worst of their behaviors and ideals.
The titular leader of the GOP (and leading Obama hater) reiterated to a
fellow Obama hater that, indeed, he does want the President of the
United States to fail. Courtesy of Think Progress:
Missing
from Rush's rant is any acknowledgment that Obama is cleanin up the
mess, the massive failures, left behind by George Bush and Dick Cheney.
For over a month Dick Cheney has been justifying his support for the illegal use of torture
by claiming that CIA documents prove that torture was effective in
saving American lives. This was very convenient for Cheney since the
documents which supposedly show this are classified. Although Cheney’s claims contradict general statements
on the lack of efficacy from torture, we could not evaluate the actual
documents Cheney was referring to. Fortunately Senator Carl Levin has
reviewed the documents and has stated that Cheney is lying:
Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, says former Vice President Dick Cheney is lying when he
claims that classified CIA memos show that enhanced interrogation
techniques like waterboarding worked.
Levin, speaking at the Foreign Policy Association’s annual dinner in
Washington on Wednesday, said an investigation by his committee into
detainee abuse charges over the use of the techniques — now deemed
torture by the Obama administration — “gives the lie to Mr. Cheney’s
claims.”
The Michigan Democrat told the crowd that the two CIA documents that
Cheney wants released “say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do
the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use
of abusive techniques.”
“I hope that the documents are declassified, so that people can
judge for themselves what is fact, and what is fiction,” he added.
A former FBI interrogator who successfully extracted secrets from
senior Al Qaeda members using psychological tricks has gone public with
his feelings on the ineffectiveness of torture. As he explained on CBC's As It Happens,
torture is especially bad when you've got a "ticking bomb" situation,
as a good psychological interrogator can establish rapport in hours,
while torturing Al Quaeda suspects required dozens of sessions with
waterboards and days of sleep deprivation to get any intelligence (and
what it got, no one trusts):
Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an
article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened
up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free
cookies.
Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.
"Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had
been served with tea: 'He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with
sugar in it,' Time's Bobby Ghosh wrote. "At their next meeting, the
Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the
edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor.
"We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for
him," Soufan told Ghosh. "So he started talking to us instead of giving
us lectures..."
"It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of
hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda
-- including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers -- but the
cookies were the turning point," Ghosh writes.
"After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan said. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."
Along with Satanism, Scientology and the GOP's friends over at the Moonie newspaper. I've often said that the radical Mormon activists who we're forced to deal with - the ones who forcibly baptize dead Jewish Holocaust victims in an effort to steal their souls,
the ones who spend tens of millions in other states to force Christians
and others to live according to Mormon views of morality - bear a
striking resemblance to Scientologists. We have a Scientology mother
ship here in DC, and if you ever talk to any of its inhabitants it's
remarkably like talking to activist Mormons. Sweet as pie to a fault
until you question them on anything, then the long knives, and the
lawyers, come out.
Howard Fineman sees the modern-day GOP leaders are the same GOP leader with the same old bag of tricks:
Right now there are two RNCs here in Washington, side by side. The contrast is instructive.
One,
the Republican National Committee, is a clueless self-parody. The
other, the (R)ush-(N)ewt-(C)heney tag team, is providing the real
muscle as the Republican right begins to build traction in taking on
President Obama and the Democrats.
The official RNC just spent
the last two days wasting time and inviting ridicule—listening to a
listless, empty speech by its chairman, Michael Steele, and debating
the grand idea of calling the Democrats "socialists." Meanwhile, Rush
Limbaugh hammers away at the Democrats and the president on radio every
day; Newt Gingrich sarcastically attacks Nancy Pelosi on The Daily Show
(and gets laughs for doing so); and Dick Cheney continues his
high-profile, Iraq-star media tour.
Okay. How
idiotic are the people in the traditional media? Speaker Pelosi said
quite firmly that the CIA misled her about the Bush administration's
torture policy back in 2002. She was adamant. And, yes, it was torture.
Yet,
traditional media types can't grasp that concept. Surely, they're
breathlessly intimating, Pelosi must be wrong. Do they not remember
what really happened back in 2002-2003? I made the mistake of watching
the start of the TODAY Show this morning. Matt Lauer and the ever
painful Kelly O'Donnell seem shocked, shocked that Pelosi would say
someone in the Bush government would have lied back in 2002. For Christ
Sakes, George Bush, Dick Cheney and their entire administration were
flat out lying to the American people back then about terrorism and
Iraq. They misled us into a war -- abetted by the traditional media.
Do
these idiots in the media not remember that? The likes of Lauer,
O'Donnell and their colleague covering the White House, David Gregory,
were regurgitating the Bush team's lies -- and echoing the drumbeat for
war. It was appalling -- beyond appalling -- that no one challenged the
lies back then. Now, they can't grasp that someone in the government
was lying about these issues. Idiots.
Yes, because that whole "conservative" thing has been working so well
for the Republicans. The religious right won't give up without a fight,
and so far they're taking the GOP down with them. God speed.
In
an interview with the California newspaper The Visalia Times-Delta,
Huckabee said the GOP would only further decline in influence should it
alienate social conservatives — largely considered the most energetic
and loyal faction of the party.
"Throw the social conservatives
the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will
be as irrelevant as the Whigs," he said in reference to the American
political party that largely disbanded in the mid 1800s. "They'll
basically be a party of gray-haired old men sitting around the country
club puffing cigars, sipping brandy and wondering whatever happened to
the country. That will be the end of the party," he said in the
interview published Thursday.
I saw this yesterday, it's sick. The GOP continues to seek the lowest part of the lowest gutter they can find. No one who claims to be part of the GOP deserves any respect at all. There may be some reasonable Republicans in the US but if they claim to still support the GOP they are admitting to supporting liars, thugs and bullies and the most dishonest and sick people who seek to undermine and destroy America. The GOP is a MUCH larger threat to America than OBL or the looniest of terrorists. A suicide vest or a plane flown into a building is not even a drop in a bucket compared to what the GOP seeks to accomplish.
Who do they think this appeals to? They seem to think the more slimy sheep they can pull in the better. Are they going to elect Rush Limbaugh as their Grand Wizard next.
The Republicans are working with fervor and desperation to inculcate
the false notion that closing Guantanamo Bay means releasing terrorists
into small-town America. You have to see this incredibly dishonest
video put out by the Senate Republicans, complete with spooky music
building to a crescendo. Here's the video:
The editing and theme are extremely dishonest. They continually edit
in clips of news shows asking "where would the detainees go" without
ever showing the actual answer to the question: they'll go to maximum
security prisons, either civilian or military. Because they don't want
viewers to hear the real answer, they want them to see the lie at the
end of the video:
Terrorists: Coming Soon To a Neighborhood Near You
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, past chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and now candidate for governor of Michigan, said at a press conference
last week that Obama is going to take terrorists "away from Gitmo and
plunk them down in the middle of Michigan, in the middle of Kansas, in
the middle of Virginia or in the middle of New York."
They actually want people to believe that the Obama administration
is just going to drop off Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the corner of Main
and Elm. Heck, they'll probably give him a gun and some C-4 too. All of
this is patently absurd. Why mince words? It's a baldfaced lie.
When the detainees from Gitmo are transferred out, they will be
housed in maximum security prisons. That might mean military prisons,
like the Navy brig that housed Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla in South
Carolina. Or it might mean a civilian prison like the Florence, Colorado Supermax prison where Padilla is currently being held after being found guilty.
The Colorado Supermax facility also houses Omar Abdel-Rahman, the
mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Zacarias Moussaoui,
Wadih el-Hage, Ramzi Yousef, Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber") and
Mahmud Abouhalima, as well as domestic terrorists like Terry Nichols,
Eric Robert Rudolph and the Unabomber. Most have been held there for
more than a decade without incident.
There were 425,000 POWs held in the United States during WW II,
eight of them right here in Michigan. They included Camp Allegan, Camp
Owosso and Fort Custer in Battle Creek. There are about 250 men left at
Gitmo. But be afraid....be very afraid....and don't forget to blame the
other party for your fear so you'll vote for us.
An army contractor received a $12,500 fine, five years' probation, and no jail time for killing a flex-cuffed Afghan who had doused his colleague with gasoline and set her one fire.
The immolation victim eventually died of her injuries, but she was still alive when the contractor shot the prisoner.
As horrific as the provocation was, the sentence seems awfully light
for first degree murder of a prisoner. Killing a handcuffed prisoner is
absolutely beyond the pale.
Update: The contractor was initially charged with murder
but the charge was later reduced to manslaughter, an offense which
carries up to eight years in prison. Based on the circumstances
outlined in the Danger Room post, I think the charge was way too light,
and the sentence was a joke relative to the charge.
The
contractor executed a prisoner in U.S. custody. I don't care how evil
the prisoner's conduct was. In wartime, soldiers will inevitably take
prisoners who have done terrible things to their comrades. The
contractor ostensibly got an unusually light sentence because the judge
agreed that he was suffering from diminished responsibility because of
the trauma of the attack. If we let the fog of war count as a defense
for killing prisoners, we're opening the door to summary executions on
the battlefield. The contractor is a former Army Ranger, so he has been
trained to control himself in battle.
Rush and Hannity do make themselves easy targets. And, Wanda Sykes let them have it.
You
know that both of these guys are going to be in a frenzy about this
over the next couple days...the hard core right-wingers are very
thin-skinned and have no sense of humor:
If
I had to guess, I'd bet Wanda Sykes really doesn't care what Rush and
Hannity say. It'll just give her more material and opportunities to
respond...
So, of course, Cheney picks Limbaugh, who is about as popular as the Republican party right now. From ThinkProgress:
CHENEY:
Well, if I had to choose — in terms of being a Republican — I’d go with
Rush Limbaugh, I think. My take on it was that Colin had already left
the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.
And
that's why we want Cheney on television as much as possible. Keep
digging the GOP's own grave, Dick. Keep telegraphing to the country
just how conservative and far to the right today's Republican party
really is.
According to a Washington Post/ABC poll, only 21% of Americans
identify themselves as Republicans. That is getting dangerously close
to the percentage of Americans who believe they have seen UFOs or alien
craft or have been abducted by aliens. I think they may be the same
individuals.
Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to
show his Fordham University class how readily private information is
available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was
collecting personal information from the Web about himself.
This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made
public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more
protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same
project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to
the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.
His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only
Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food
and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of
his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.
And, as Scalia himself made clear in a statement to Above the Law, he isn't happy about the invasion of his privacy:
"Professor Reidenberg's exercise is an example of perfectly legal,
abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in
judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any," the
justice says, among other comments.
Somehow, I don't think "poor judgment" is going to be much of a
defense against those with agendas more malicious than Professor
Reidenberg.
Let's give Guantanamo to Spain and let them use it as they see fit
If extraordinary renditions worked for the US, they could certainly work for Interpol and Spain. I have never seen anyone as vile as this, not even Dick Cheney. If someone like this ever used the word "dear" in talking to me, my next sentence would definitely include the "C" word along with a number of other appropriately descriptive terms.
A lot of space missions are poised for launch right now! NASA has the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which will blast off no earlier than June 2, and the Hubble servicing mission for the Space Shuttle Atlantis is now scheduled for launch on May 11. I’ll have lots more about that soon.
Herschel and Planck
The European Space Agency isn’t exactly taking it easy, either: Herschel and Planck are two astronomy missions that will launch on a single Ariane 5 rocket on May 14th.
Herschel
is a massive infrared telescopic observatory with a 3.5 meter mirror,
by far the largest infrared observatory ever put in space. It will look
at far-infrared light, from 55 to 180 microns (our eyes are sensitive
to light out to roughly 0.7 microns, so this is way out in the IR). For
comparison, the awesome Spitzer
telescope has a mirror 0.85 meters across, so Herschel will return
incredible imagery of the sky. I can’t wait to see what it shows us!
Planck will map the entire sky at microwave frequencies, looking at the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. The NASA satellite WMAP
did this a few years back and answered many questions about the physics
of the early Universe, but as we have to come to expect in science, any
new observations will also raise even more questions. Planck will have ten times
the resolution that WMAP did, so it will see smaller features on the
sky. It’s also more sensitive than WMAP was, so it will see fainter
features as well. This means it may answer a lot of those questions
WMAP raised.
Now get this: the Big Bang model is the best one we have to explain
the origin of the Universe. But it does not tell us about how that
moment occurred. Did the Universe get its start from a singular event,
a quantum fluctuation in some larger metaverse? Are we the last in a
series of past Big Bangs and recollapses (the last because we’re pretty
sure the cosmic expansion will go on forever this time)? Are we here
because two high-dimensional membranes collided?
WMAP map of the microwave sky
These questions stretch our brains to the breaking point… but the thing is, there is science here! These different ideas predict different structures in the background glow leftover from the Big Bang.
WMAP saw many cooler and warmer spots on the sky in that microwave
glow, equal numbers of them. But some theories say we should see just a
hair more cold spots. WMAP did a fine job observing the sky, but it
simply lacked the resolution to be able to see any asymmetries in the
hot and cold spot numbers.
Planck may very well have the resolution needed to see that. Do you understand the implications? We
may be on the verge of determining if the origin of the Universe was a
singular event, or if it was due to some other mechanism.
We’re on the edge of "holy crap!" territory with this. We have
progressed from last century’s having no clue about how the cosmos got
its start, to now possibly being able to get a handle on what happened before the Big Bang.
That’s why I love science! Some people try to tell me that science
will never answer the big questions we have in life. To them I say:
baloney! The real problem is your questions aren’t big enough.
If you enjoyed Don McLeroy and Terri Leo in the first Texas
Intellect Massacre, where they butchered the science standards with the
Chainsaw of Jesus, wait till you see the sequel. These murderers of
reason have now set their sights on the social studies curriculum and
they're appointing a panel of "experts" -- read "wingnut ideologues" --
to screw up that subject too. My friends at the Texas Freedom Network
report:
The Texas State Board of Education is set to appoint a
social studies curriculum "expert" panel that includes absurdly
unqualified ideologues who are hostile to public education and argue
that laws and public policies should be based on their narrow
interpretations of the Bible.
Who's going to be showing up in the sequel for more than a cameo appearance? Get a load of these villains:
TFN has obtained the names of "experts" appointed by
far-right state board members. Those panelists will guide the revision
of social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools. They
include David Barton of the fundamentalist, Texas-based group
WallBuilders, whose degree is in religious education, not the social
sciences, and the Rev. Peter Marshall of Peter Marshall Ministries in
Massachusetts, who suggests that California wildfires and Hurricane
Katrina were divine punishments for tolerance of homosexuality.
The two have argued that the Constitution doesn't protect
separation of church and state and hold a variety of other extreme
views related to religion, education and government, TFN President
Kathy Miller said.
"It's absurd to suggest that Texas universities don't have
accomplished scholars in the field who are more qualified than
ideologues who share a narrow political agenda," Miller said. "What's
next? Rush Limbaugh on the 'expert' panel? It's clear now that just
appointing a new chairman won't end this board's outrageous efforts to
politicize the education of our schoolchildren. It's time for the
Legislature to make sweeping changes to the board and its control over
what our kids learn in public schools."
"With Don McLeroy's confirmation hanging in the balance in the
Senate and lawmakers considering 15 bills that would strip the state
board of its authority, these board members continue trying to push
extremist politics into Texas classrooms," she said. "It's as if
they're daring the Legislature to call them on it."
Barton, former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party, is a
self-styled "historian" without any formal training in the field. He
argues that separation of church and state is a "myth" and that the
nation's laws should be based on Scripture. He says, for example, that
the Bible forbids taxes on income and capital gains. Yet even such
groups as Texas Baptists Committed and the Baptist Joint Committee have
sharply criticized Barton's interpretations of the Constitution and
history
Science is Great! Praise be Science! Behead Those Who Insult Science!
I was reading Pharyngula this weekend, when I read a post regarding the distortion of atheists’ goals by an English newspaper.
While I agree with Mr. Meyers argument that the goals of the atheist
community are being skewed by the Telegraph, since atheists’ views are
misrepresented all the time I can’t say I was surprised by it. But
something did stand out to me.
A church lobbyist in the Telegraph’s story used the term “militant atheist”, and said that “militant atheist were attacking the children”.
I’ve heard the term used before, but didn’t really think about it in
depth until now. What exactly is a militant atheist? The word militant
has a very strong and very negative connotation in today’s post 9/11, 3/11, 7/7, and Mumbai
world. When someone says militant, what is the next thought in your
head? I know for me it conjures up terrorist, extremist, guerrilla, and
other less than desirable labels. The word is very much associated with
violence and unrest. Naturally this is done on purpose by the religious
right to discredit and demonize atheists. Trying to define their
opponents with a negative label, easily repeatable slogan or caricaturehas
been their strategy for a long time. Anyone reading a “tax and spend
liberal”, or a “flip flopper”? The fact is atheists aren’t militant in
the sense we think about today, if anything they could stand to be more
forceful in their rejection of faith (new atheism).
What purpose do these negative labels serve? Well, from an academic
stand point, it’s much easier to dismiss the militant atheist, or
Darwinist Dawkins, than it is to the Oxford Professor of Evolutionary
Biology Dawkins.
Atheist and theists alike can agree the above mentioned terrorist attacks were all done by religious militants. Ever heard of an
atheist terrorist attack? No. Large religious gatherings in the Muslim
world often include burning effigies, anti-American chants, threats and
calls to violence against non-Muslims and the staple riotous mob. In
using the term militant atheist, apologists want to stir up images of
Dawkins igniting a crowd with fiery, Palin-esque speeches. Christians
pal-around with Satan maybe? How about Christopher Hitches leading a
mass protest/riot with an alleged "militant atheist" fringe, burning
churches and attacking believers? During the annual American Atheist
Convention, did the atheist take to the streets? Did they Burn effigies
of the Pope? Were there calls to harm and indeed murder theist? The
fact is, you will never see anything like that. Atheist do not display
the raw hostility and hatred that is found in many theist groups.
Hopefully by now you can see the point I am driving at here. Just
because a theist group can have moderates, and militants, doesn’t mean
this structure applies to all ideological organizations. There are no
militant, terrorist, or extremist atheists in the modern world. There
are forceful opponents of theism, not violent movements. Theists cannot
make the same claim, though I'm sure they do as they live their whole
lives making ridiculous statements, see Crocoduck.
Going door to door, attacking someones faith at their home, and trying
to convert them, now that would be militant. Has an atheist ever came
knocking on a Saturday morning? Maybe we should, but the sad truth is,
we would be likely to be violently assaulted one time or another.
Moving along, another question comes up, what
is wrong with being a forceful opponent of faith? If I were to tell any
given believer that I belong to the Church of the Tooth Fairy, I’m sure
they would have numerous questions. No doubt they would at least
snicker at my belief system once we've parted ways. And they well
should, the idea of the tooth fairy as a deity is absurd. However the
tooth fairy is just as a legitimate deity as any other. Is pointing
that out militant? Or is it simply stating what in the atheists’ view,
ought to be obvious? Why is it that a theist’s questioning of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
somehow less militant than the followers of His Noodlyness questioning
the existence of Yahweh, Allah, Baal, Apollo, or any other of the
thousands of gods that have come and go?
In
the Theist/Atheist system, only one can be said to militant. To suggest
otherwise is at best a misrepresentation, and at worst an outright lie.
Category: Posted on: April 28, 2009 9:16 AM, by Ed Brayton
Here's another one of those classic Worldnutdaily headlines:
Yes, it's an "exclusive," which as always means it's something so
breathtakingly idiotic that no other "news outlet" would even consider
publishing it.
The book of Deuteronomy will save
America? Which parts, one wonders, should we put into practice in order
to save America. Perhaps Chapter 13, which commands the murder of
anyone who dares to suggest that your religion is false and theirs is
true:
13:6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or
thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as
thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other
gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;
13:7 Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh
unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even
unto the other end of the earth;
13:8 Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither
shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou
conceal him:
13:9 But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him
to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.
13:10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he
hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought
thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
Or perhaps chapter 22, which commands the murder of any woman who is not a virgin on her wedding day:
22:13 If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate
her, 22:14 And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an
evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her,
I found her not a maid:
22:15 Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and
bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the
city in the gate:
22:16 And the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my
daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her;
22:17 And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I
found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my
daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders
of the city.
22:18 And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him;
22:19 And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and
give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an
evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may
not put her away all his days. 22:20 But if this thing be true, and the
tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: 22:21 Then they shall
bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of
her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath
wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so
shalt thou put evil away from among you.
Or perhaps a new rule for the military that says if they see a
beautiful woman in Iraq or Afghanistan and want to have sex with her,
they can bring her home, shave her head and make her their wife, as
decreed in chapter 21:
21:10 When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies,
and the LORD thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou
hast taken them captive,
21:11 And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire
unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; 21:12 Then thou
shalt bring her home to thine house, and she shall shave her head, and
pare her nails;
21:13 And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and
shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a
full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her
husband, and she shall be thy wife.
But hey, the next verse does say that if you don't like her, you can
make kick her out but you can't sell her. By all means, let's "save
America" by implementing the barbaric rules found in the book of
Deuteronomy.
Category: Posted on: April 28, 2009 9:30 AM, by Ed Brayton
Andrew
Sullivan finds a Youtube video of George W. Bush on an Arab television
station after the Abu Ghraib situation went public, explaining the
difference between a free nation with the rule of law and a
dictatorship. He says:
It's important for people to understand that in a
democracy, there will be a full investigation. In other words, we want
to know the truth. In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse
... there will be a full investigation, and justice will be delivered.
... It's very important for people and your listeners to understand
that in our country, when an issue is brought to our attention on this
magnitude, we act. And we act in a way in which leaders are willing to
discuss it with the media. ... In other words, people want to know the
truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn't be
answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn't be saying that the
system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the
investigation.
Isn't it ironic? Don't you think? Video below the fold.
GOP - the party of nobody cares about sick anti-American fucks like you anymore
...with apologies to those few GOPer's left who are desperately clinging to the few, and increasingly rare, rational GOP thoughts (I can't think of any).
This is why the Republicans are at 21%. This is why moderate
Republicans have either been defeated, retired, or have become
Democrats. This is why people like me, and Markos, and Arianna once
were Republicans, and now no more (I can't really speak for Markos and
Arianna, but you get the idea). The Republican party is dying. It began
at least a decade ago. The party moved so far to the right, embraced
such extremists and extremism - calling Obama a socialist? - that a
super-majority of Americans now no longer identify with the GOP.
And speaking of Michael Steele, let's not forget that it was Steele who said the GOP would seek retribution
for voting for the stimulus package. So let's all give Michael
"pro-choice (sometimes) and pro-gay-marriage (kind of)" Steele a hearty
thanks for the great work he's doing leading the GOP. Today couldn't
have happened without him.
PS Steele, in his live phone
interview on CNN, also keeps using the word "Democrat" incorrectly -
it's something far-right Republicans do, in some kind of weird effort
to diminish Democrats. For example, he just referred to the "Democrat
primary" and the "Democrat base." It's Democratic. You'd think the head
of the Republican party would know how to speak proper English. But
putting that aside, it's one more sign of just how bad the Republican
party has become - resorting to cute little far-right mind games like
mispronouncing the name of the party rather than proposing ways to get
us out of the economic crisis and avoid a worldwide flu pandemic.
Remember when it was the liberal guests who ended up looking like sputtering morons on the O'Reilly Factor? Tonight it was the host. 
